In my grief I sit on a park bench with you, both of us just cartoon characters feeding pigeons when I turn to you and say, it’s going to get cold soon
Better find shelter.
Cold soon
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Category Archives: grief
The burn boat
You take the burn boat out
Should have been used to
Ferried day trippers
Or taken provisions for the larder
But not this–
Watch a man built then burn
His own funeral pyre
With the ease of a fraud or
Automaton
Feigning the act of breathing
In and
Out
Just to
fool us all.
Birds fly across
Last time I call you darling
Birds fly across
Crane toward heaven,
still see/only shadows
As the crow flies
light flies faster
-sound far behind
But shadows, old friend
In cold pursuit
And you so sure you can
Outrun them
We Speak in Tongues
I have sometimes heard
The voice of God
remarkably salty
And full of fire
He is both
Placable and implacable in His anger
The first with sullen men
Then unsparing with his only Son
No siblings without the unendurable
No blind and lame set free
Without his blood for me
1 Corinthians 13:1 NIV
[1] If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.
The Vigilant Ones
If I were to write a book of fiction for my children I would construct people for them, community, a family, let’s say, a big, sprawling, messy family
Maybe they would live next to some kind of river
Maybe the dogs would talk or the fish would taste like brightly colored jello confections.
Or maybe these fictional people, these purely hypothetical people, would just be back up
The silhouetted figures you might see on the crest of the hill above the sycamore tree as the sun sets
After the dam breaks
When they-you-we
Might need the vigilant ones
The most.
Luis, I…
Luis, I once lived in a country where the money I earned was worthless outside the country but could buy beautiful, irreplaceable things inside the country. I had a gigantic blue suitcase, a backpack. I took treasure home, but not enough. I should have emptied my bags of all the replaceable things and brought home treasure.
You are home treasure
You are Home, Treasure.
The Last Normal Day
We are eternal, they are eternal, I tell her, but I know that there is something else, the purest kind of paradox, or is it tautology? Etiology? The woman in the park, on the streets, flagging down motorists, in the parking lots of churches, where people congregate like flocks of birds, always, always asking this uncomfortable question–
When was your last normal day? When was your last normal day?
When? When the truth
Stalks in
Wide awake
Alpha Centauri
An old lady sits in the light-filled atrium, says there is a special place in Hell…a special place in Hell, there is a special place in Hell..there are bombs going off somewhere and she refuses to watch, she says she will not watch while behind her emphatic form, the nearly full moon slips its moorings and floats across the pierced blue sky.
Lorentz Transformation
She dots the house with sticky notes scrawled with litany reminders–cupped in His hands, asleep in the boat, keep your eyes on Jesus, you are my “Wonderwall,”
As the preacher men go silent, as they are oft to do, in their complacency and fear
As though any of us can escape the
Light-blast of the Divine.
Coffee with Tara
I can’t have coffee with Tara, the stuff she drinks is way too strong for me now, but I wait for her anyway, keep glancing out smudgy windows at the passing clouds, shafts of light, signifying every
valley filled, hill made low, road made straight, and all these rough, rough ways, smoothed at last.
Luke 3:5
Tara B.
Carrying Light 